Extreme events management in complex situations create unusual challenges for practitioners when time and resources are limited, and the outcomes of failure are critical.
Risks and menaces are extreme, information is often insufficient, space is restricted and time is scarce for practitioners to make a decision.
As collective groups become more mutually dependent, the variety of probable interactions among individuals and organizations, and the framework in which they operate increases, and the number of elements that impacts possible actions and consequences in beneficial or adverse ways also increases.
Afterward, reactions to unexpected events tend to turn into an emergent, large-scale, sociotechnical system of persons and group, which unavoidably require coordinating their activities in a risky and unknown spatiotemporal milieu.
Then, decision making in the unknown environment has been considered by many academics; each contributes to this particularly intricate duty.
Our approach emphases on the delays existing among the numerous levels of available information to decide, and to review how practitioners fail or preserve their ability for collective actions. The responsibility of each actor in the system is to maintain an adequate level of information to provide comprehensive support to all operations and, at the same occasion, to maintain a clear-cut understanding on its specific performance of the entire system's reaction. This objective can only be maintained through an adequate picture of a space-time framework in which operates the system and actors. Such a task is cognitively exigent for people. Facing an unexpected event is an activity tremendously tricky to all participants.
Hence, the aptitude to adjust to the constant development of spatial and temporal surrounding is essential to a successful performance at all levels of the organization.
Also, the article explores how practitioners could improve their decision through a better apprehension of the parameters of time and space. Assumed the augmented occurrence of extreme events and the escalation of the amount of large-scale deployment, socio-technical systems have better to take into account the evolution of their space of operation but also the management of their time vis-à-vis the existing and accessible information.